*BSD News Article 31366


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From: mark@elea.umd.edu (Mark Sienkiewicz)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: NetBSD 0.9 stray characters on console?
Date: 7 Jun 1994 21:14:16 GMT
Organization: Zeno, IPST, University of Maryland
Lines: 32
Message-ID: <2t2nv8$4g5@umd5.umd.edu>
References: <2t28i2$6tf@spock.dis.cccd.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: elea.umd.edu

In article <2t28i2$6tf@spock.dis.cccd.edu>,
Michael Peer <mpeer@cccd.edu> wrote:

>The question I have is I am getting stray characters on my screen, mostly
>% and ' characters.  At times they even stay there, even though I scroll
>the screen.                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
 ^^^^^^^^^^^

>Some information on my system:
>IBM CGA monitor
>clone CGA card

The fact that the characters don't always move when you scroll the 
screen, and that you don't get them in telnet sessions, and that you 
have a CGA (which is likely very old), makes me suspect this:  Your 
video board is flaking out.  Old hardware does that sometimes.

Try another video board if you can get one.  It seems unlikely to
me that there is a software cause for your problem.

>p.s. You can have a good laugh about my 386SX, but its the best I could
>do with no idea if I would ever be able to get a real UNIX system
>working, I wonder if the slow cpu is part of the problem?

I'm not laughing.  I once used Unix on a PDP 11/23 with 128k of memory.
It was what I could get.  Likewise, you use what you can get.  Anybody
who can't handle that is welcome to buy you a new computer. :)

I don't think the "slow" CPU is a problem.  (I mean, other than taking
a long time to do things... :)

Mark S.